“This is what I want you to do: tell someone you love them, and that dinner’s at six.”

~Bread & Wine~

I love giveaways. Both winning them {hello St. Regis Spa Day} and giving things I love away. Bread & Wine is especially a special one to me, with its calling to live well, and to come back to the table. To be in community, and to stay in community.

I am so excited to jump on amazon, and send you the book,

Mrs. Cowgill 🙂
{Your Gonna Love IT!}

It’s been a whirlwind week. Lots of appointments, starting to come out of the 1st trimester daze {or doom} as I should label it, and looking forward to summer and all its sunny glory.

Were knee deep {literally} in a backyard re-model, and my activities director {Samantha Grace} is running a tight ship.

When I first started reading Bread & Wine, I had recently found out I was preggars. Hungry, happy, beyond words beaming with excitement and joy I read Shauna’s words with a fresh outlook, after a season of growth and sadness. And just as quickly as I begun, I had to press pause. All of a sudden, I felt like I had been run over by a semi-truck. I could no longer think, much less read, think about eating or cooking, or basically anything other than surviving each day.The first trimester and I went from fast friends, to arch enemies.

Finally able to pick up B&W as of late, I flew through the book, and as always with her words, I felt like I was home. A love letter to life around the table, our desire and need to be connected and in community, a book about hunger, shame, and squashing fear and living fully alive.

You merely need to read the first chapter to see that this book about cabernet and crusty baguette’s isn’t going to just satisfy you at meal time, but make you do some serious soul searching too.

In B&W Shauna talks about how food is our common ground- the currency we offer to one another, the thing we hold and handle when we enter into the lives of those we love. This book on entertaining in my home and the process of “redecorating my heart” made me want to swing wide my door in suburbia, dirty up my kitchen, and throw fabulous dinner parties. At the same time, it beckoned me to have more intimate conversation with friends, open those rusty areas of my life with others, be more vulnerable, honest, and authentic.

Basically, in the midst of a feeling physically, emotionally, and mentally not 100% myself, B&W gave me the margin to snuggle into my fuzzy socks, and live vicariously through stories of a fellow life lover’s travels, both in her home, her kitchen, her life, and most of all, my most treasured place to be allowed to see into, her heart.

Tales of victory, and defeat, and learning to throw off fear, and untangle doubt.To live with a deep seated sense of “enough”.

“Enough. I don’t want to live like that anymore. And enough: I have enough….I want to cultivate a deep sense of gratitude, of groundedness, of enough, even when I am lounging for something more. The longing and the gratitude, both. I’m practing believing that God knows more than I know, that he sees what I can’t, that’s he’s weaving a future that I can’t even imagine from where I am sitting. Extraordinary indeed. More than enough.”Bread & Wine -Enough-

Memorable moments spent in the kitchen, new recipes that are dying to be whipped up, and a cooking club that I am aching to start. B&W urges you to start where you are. In every area of your life, not just in the kitchen. Shauna feels like a close friend. One who just “gets you”. Over and over again I would underline her words, circle them, and write in the margin, “YES. THIS”. As if she read my mind. I long for books like this. The ones I will read, re-read, and give away a thousand times over because in my heart of hearts, I want all my friends, family, and lets be honest, humanity to feel more secure, present, free, engaged, excited, loved, cherished, and adored. That’s how I felt reading B&W.That’s how I want you to feel too.

I am giving away one copy of B&W.Let’s start where we are. Whatever area of life that might be.Bread & Wine is a gift. To your heart, your kitchen, to your relationships, and yourself.

“How valuable it is to live the life in front of you, regardless of how tempting it is to press your face on the glass of other people’s lives online, even though doing that is so much safer and so entirely addictive…We fragment our minds for a reason, of course-because we like the idea of being in sixty-seven other places instead of the one lame, lonely place we find ourselves on some days…I practice since that trip, being entirely where I am, glamorous or not, and what I find us that it’s better to be in one place, wholly and full-hearted than a thousand splintery half places, glamorous as they may be”.Bread & Wine -Swimming in Silence-

To enter this giveaway, simply make a comment below, and share your favorite wine {nothing fancy necessary, my favorite bottle of italian white wine is $3.99!} or your favorite memory around the table this past month!

xoxoOCGoodmama

*You have a week to enter! The giveaway will close next Wednesday night {May 1st at midnight}.PPS- If your looking for a Mother’s Day Gift for the Mama’s in your life, This.IS.IT!

And I heard that KK just recently {like within the last week} one a half a million dollars in the Chase Community Giving Awards.

So happy for them!

SO, here are the details!-OCGoodmama Giveaway- Krochet Kids-

To enter the giveaway, you can do the following:1. Leave a comment below…Anything at all… HO, HO, HO counts!2. Like OCGoodmama on Facebook.3. Follow OCGoodmama on Twitter.4. Share this giveaway.{On Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc}.5. Like Krochet Kids on Facebook.

Phew. That’s 5 ways to enter.{When you comment below, let me know where-and how many times you entered!}.{Each item above gets you entered once. So if you do all five, thats five separate entries!}

The winner will be chosen at random {with the help of some online random device chooser thing and with the help of my hubby}. Anything involving math scares me.SO, don’t worry, I won’t be involved in that.I know you were worried mama. The Giveaway Starts Now, and Will Run through This Friday at Midnight {West Coast Time}.I will announce the winner this Saturday and drop the hat in the mail to you!